Zuleika Dobson; Or, An Oxford Love Story. Sir Max Beerbohm
another hollow pause. The Duke’s heart beat violently within him. Why had he not asked her to take the star and keep it as a gift? Too late now! Why could he not throw himself at her feet? Here were two beings, lovers of each other, with none by. And yet …
She was examining a water-colour on the wall, seemed to be absorbed by it. He watched her. She was even lovelier than he had remembered; or rather her loveliness had been, in some subtle way, transmuted. Something had given to her a graver, nobler beauty. Last night’s nymph had become the Madonna of this morning. Despite her dress, which was of a tremendous tartan, she diffused the pale authentic radiance of a spirituality most high, most simple. The Duke wondered where lay the change in her. He could not understand. Suddenly she turned to him, and he understood. No longer the black pearl and the pink, but two white pearls! … He thrilled to his heart’s core.
“I hope,” said Zuleika, “you aren’t awfully vexed with me for coming like this?”
“Not at all,” said the Duke. “I am delighted to see you.” How inadequate the words sounded, how formal and stupid!
“The fact is,” she continued, “I don’t know a soul in Oxford. And I thought perhaps you’d give me luncheon, and take me to see the boat-races. Will you?”
“I shall be charmed,” he said, pulling the bell-rope. Poor fool! he attributed the shade of disappointment on Zuleika’s face to the coldness of his tone. He would dispel that shade. He would avow himself. He would leave her no longer in this false position. So soon as he had told them about the meal, he would proclaim his passion.
The bell was answered by the landlady’s daughter.
“Miss Dobson will stay to luncheon,” said the Duke. The girl withdrew. He wished he could have asked her not to.
He steeled himself. “Miss Dobson,” he said, “I wish to apologise to you.”
Zuleika looked at him eagerly. “You can’t give me luncheon? You’ve got something better to do?”
“No. I wish to ask you to forgive me for my behaviour last night.”
“There is nothing to forgive.”
“There is. My manners were vile. I know well what happened. Though you, too, cannot have forgotten, I won’t spare myself the recital. You were my hostess, and I ignored you. Magnanimous, you paid me the prettiest compliment woman ever paid to man, and I insulted you. I left the house in order that I might not see you again. To the doorsteps down which he should have kicked me, your grandfather followed me with words of kindliest courtesy. If he had sped me with a kick so skilful that my skull had been shattered on the kerb, neither would he have outstepped those bounds set to the conduct of English gentlemen, nor would you have garnered more than a trifle on account of your proper reckoning. I do not say that you are the first person whom I have wantonly injured. But it is a fact that I, in whom pride has ever been the topmost quality, have never expressed sorrow to any one for anything. Thus, I might urge that my present abjectness must be intolerably painful to me, and should incline you to forgive. But such an argument were specious merely. I will be quite frank with you. I will confess to you that, in this humbling of myself before you, I take a pleasure as passionate as it is strange. A confusion of feelings? Yet you, with a woman’s instinct, will have already caught the clue to it. It needs no mirror to assure me that the clue is here for you, in my eyes. It needs no dictionary of quotations to remind me that the eyes are the windows of the soul. And I know that from two open windows my soul has been leaning and signalling to you, in a code far more definitive and swifter than words of mine, that I love you.”
Zuleika, listening to him, had grown gradually paler and paler. She had raised her hands and cowered as though he were about to strike her. And then, as he pronounced the last three words, she had clasped her hands to her face and with a wild sob darted away from him. She was leaning now against the window, her head bowed and her shoulders quivering.
The Duke came softly behind her. “Why should you cry? Why should you turn away from me? Did I frighten you with the suddenness of my words? I am not versed in the tricks of wooing. I should have been more patient. But I love you so much that I could hardly have waited. A secret hope that you loved me too emboldened me, compelled me. You DO love me. I know it. And, knowing it, I do but ask you to give yourself to me, to be my wife. Why should you cry? Why should you shrink from me? Dear, if there were anything … any secret … if you had ever loved and been deceived, do you think I should honour you the less deeply, should not cherish you the more tenderly? Enough for me, that you are mine. Do you think I should ever reproach you for anything that may have—”
Zuleika turned on him. “How dare you?” she gasped. “How dare you speak to me like that?”
The Duke reeled back. Horror had come into his eyes. “You do not love me!” he cried.
“LOVE you?” she retorted. “YOU?”
“You no longer love me. Why? Why?”
“What do you mean?”
“You loved me. Don’t trifle with me. You came to me loving me with all your heart.”
“How do you know?”
“Look in the glass.” She went at his bidding. He followed her. “You see them?” he said, after a long pause. Zuleika nodded. The two pearls quivered to her nod.
“They were white when you came to me,” he sighed. “They were white because you loved me. From them it was that I knew you loved me even as I loved you. But their old colours have come back to them. That is how I know that your love for me is dead.”
Zuleika stood gazing pensively, twitching the two pearls between her fingers. Tears gathered in her eyes. She met the reflection of her lover’s eyes, and her tears brimmed over. She buried her face in her hands, and sobbed like a child.
Like a child’s, her sobbing ceased quite suddenly. She groped for her handkerchief, angrily dried her eyes, and straightened and smoothed herself.
“Now I’m going,” she said.
“You came here of your own accord, because you loved me,” said the Duke. “And you shall not go till you have told me why you have left off loving me.”
“How did you know I loved you?” she asked after a pause. “How did you know I hadn’t simply put on another pair of ear-rings?”
The Duke, with a melancholy laugh, drew the two studs from his waistcoat-pocket. “These are the studs I wore last night,” he said.
Zuleika gazed at them. “I see,” she said; then, looking up, “When did they become like that?”
“It was when you left the dining-room that I saw the change in them.”
“How strange! It was when I went into the drawing-room that I noticed mine. I was looking in the glass, and”—She started. “Then you were in love with me last night?”
“I began to be in love with you from the moment I saw you.”
“Then how could you have behaved as you did?”
“Because I was a pedant. I tried to ignore you, as pedants always do try to ignore any fact they cannot fit into their pet system. The basis of my pet system was celibacy. I don’t mean the mere state of being a bachelor. I mean celibacy of the soul—egoism, in fact. You have converted me from that. I am now a confirmed tuist.”
“How dared you insult me?” she cried, with a stamp of her foot. “How dared you make a fool of me before those people? Oh, it is too infamous!”
“I have already asked you to forgive me for that. You said there was nothing to forgive.”
“I didn’t dream that you were in love with me.”
“What difference can that make?”
“All the difference! All the difference in life!”
“Sit